Ebook: Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left

"This is the most complete biography to date of one of the Russian Revolution’s most elusive characters. Boris Savinkov (1879–1925) was an artist of adventure, a Freemason, spiritualist, terrorist, novelist, scoundrel, and womanizer of legendary proportions. A child of the Russian nobility raised in Warsaw, Savinkov was a lifelong admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. His political causes included Polish socialism, the Russian Party of Social Revolutionaries’ (SRs) terrorist Battle Organization, his own anti-Bolshevik Union for the Regeneration of the Motherland and Liberty, and Mussolini’s Fascism. Vain, cynical, and arrogant by his later years, Savinkov could also be elegant, courteous, and charismatic, especially to women. He was addicted to sex and morphine. He believed that there was no morality, only beauty.

Savinkov was a terrorist with moderate aims, according to the author, whose intellectual sources included Max Stirner, Friederich Nietzsche, Konstantin Leontiev, and Louis Antoine de Saint Just. In fact, his terrorism seems to have been an end in itself, extending from the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei in 1905 to his post-1917 plots to kill Lenin and Trotsky. Political violence was a great adventure in which Savinkov was never the trigger man, but only the conspirator and rhetorician. His apocalyptic rendering of the assassination of Sergei appeared in his novel The Pale Horse (1909), and Savinkov was continually reinventing his activities in his writings.

In 1917, Alexander Kerensky gave Savinkov various military commands as a political commissar, despite the fact that he had no army service. Savinkov soon supported General Lavr Kornilov and helped provoke the Kornilov affair of August 1917. In the end, Kerensky dismissed him and Savinkov turned to other antiBolshevik activities, before and after Lenin’s seizure of power in November. Politically, Savinkov broke with the SRs and moved steadily to the right as the revolution deepened. He supported in time Ataman Kaledin, General Alekseev, Admiral Kolchak and other White leaders backed by the Allied powers.

Spence concludes that Savinkov was among other things a power seeker, an authoritarian, a villain, a fool, and a consummate schemer obsessed with violence. If Savinkov had a political dream, it involved a federal republic that would guarantee autonomy to Russia, Poland, the Baltic states, and other non-Russian areas. But terror and conspiracy were as much political ends as means. Savinkov continued his terrorist activities on into the 1920s from abroad, and ultimately committed suicide after a Soviet show trial of his activities in 1925. There was no end to Savinkov’s terrorism. He conspired to violence, never practiced it himself, and was a failed character always on the edge of important events.

This is a thorough and detailed monograph about a colorful schemer. Spence’s sources are wide-ranging, including the foreign office collections of France, Great Britain, and the U.S., Russian, Polish, English, French and German newspapers, and the archival collections of Boris Bakhmeteff (Columbia University), Savinkov and the SRs (International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam), and the Hoover Library in Palto Alto, California. Yet one is left with the impression that, for Savinkov, myth always exceeded reality in a wilderness of mirrors where truth was merely elusive and multiple reflection. Spence’s book is a serious attempt to get at that truth." -Robert C. Williams